Some things are so crazy that even crazy says, “Damn that’s fucking crazy.” For this our latest installment we travel to Argentina, where a man named Victor Cingolani, who is serving prison time for killing his wife, has married his wife’s twin sister. Let’s go over that again, step by step. Man meets woman. Man courts woman. Man and woman fall in love. Man marries woman. They are husband and wife. Husband gets angry at wife for her insatiable coupon obsession, or some such rift. Husband kills wife. Husband goes to jail. Deceased wife has twin sister. Twin sister marries the murdering husband, the erstwhile widower, who is now a husband again with an exact replica of murdered wife. Simple.

Most of your hardball thinkers and theologians are skeptical when it comes to the reality of second chances in the strictest sense, or more to the point, the promise of doing the exact same thing a second time and expecting a different result, which I think was how Albert Einstein or Isaac Asimov, or some fellow with vowels for initials, defined insanity. Sure, with failure and disappointment other opportunities of similar promise may arise, and these other opportunities may even eclipse the original failed circumstance, but a do-over is a rare thing, indeed. And a do-over that succeeds, well forget it. Even the doomed couple that marries, divorces and then for reasons both hilarious and heartbreaking decide to give it another shot may enjoy some ephemeral happiness before all of the issues that broke them up in the first place start bubbling to the surface. But now we have a man, quite a man, who has gone straight for the exact genetic copy of his former wife. Gone for the exact genetic copy, mind you, while in jail for the murder of the first, which is no small stunt. Twins are nature’s mulligan, as it turns out, a mulligan on which Mr. Cingolani was wont to capitalize. Mr. Cingolani recognized a rather unique opportunity, since cloning is still a ways down the road and robots, well, as creepy as it is, it will be some time before they can move well enough to please and are still dumb enough not to kill you in your sleep. (As I’m considering this, the robot thing might be a subject for another alembic somewhere down the road. My mind is coursing through permutations at a rate too rapid for my quickly digressing subject.)

Back to Mr. Cingolani and his dead wife’s sister….wife. The only thing that would make this whole situation slightly less strange is if, instead of twins, the sisters were triplets and Mr. Cingolani, after murdering both the first and second sister, married the third sister and killed her too. But that’s still a little weird. What might pull it closer to a sensible state of affairs is if, instead of triplets, the birth of identical quadruplets resulted in all four sisters being brutally murdered by Mr. Cingolani, each one in turn marrying him after the other’s frenzied homicide. Normalcy is restored.

The Ford Motor Company apparently has a new car coming out that offers a luxurious “hot seat” option. It seems some of the marketing folk and Illustrators (in India, maybe) had sketched an in-office joke ad campaign in which buxom women are bound and gagged in the spacious trunks of their new line of automobiles to underscore the expansiveness of the compartment. This would be highly unsettling, to say the least, if it weren’t for the fact that a smirking Silvio Berlusconi can be seen sitting in the front of the car, peering over the seat, with a victory sign raised high in the air, and with a simple sketch of the Italian prime minister, it becomes high comedy. After all, Mr. Berlusconi is responsible for something called a “Bunga Bunga” party, which according to even the most polite and restrained descriptions, is a scat-filled hump fest that is a cross between Caligula and Satyricon, starring Pan the Goat, who gags and whips the young girls in attendance while anally injecting them with a bolus of crushed ecstasy and viagra suppositories every few hours until they beg for mercy or fall into a temporary coma, whichever comes first.

Now of course we don’t want to give anybody ideas, lest all the cars be bought by vicious psychopaths like the cannibal cop from Queens, or Josef Fritzl, or any roving mob that decides a gang rape would be a good way to pass the time between gang rapes. In my novel “Wet Brain”, a kind of conceptual art story based on serial killers, the main bad guy, who drives a Fleetwood Brougham, brags that he can fit five bodies in his trunk. When asked why he would want to be able to do that, he says, “it’s nice to know a man has options.”

But with Mr. Berlusconi at the wheel, in light of his notorious activities, it seems at least like an appropriate point of humor. “I guess while we’re at it, let’s emphasize the fact that our trunks are spacious,” the illustrators reasoned. Imagine if the illustrators at Ford said, “okay, let’s be fair about this. Instead of just putting buxom cartoon women bound and gagged in the roomy trunks of a car piloted by Mr. Berlusconi, let’s just describe through limned illustration exactly what it would look like, in our commodious trunk space, based on actual accounts of Mr. Berlusconi’s “Bunga Bunga” parties.” It would probably make the graphic advertisement that was leaked to the public look like a Norman Rockwell scene of rosy-cheeked kids building a snowman with their grandparents. The real illustration based on real activities would be more like Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell”, combined with an illustrated version of “The Story of O”, added to a collage of movie stills from the filmography of porn legend Harry Reems, who has just died at the age of 65, which is four years before the age of irony. The hirsute porn legend, scourge of bathtub drains and Decency Activists everywhere, had a heart attack. Fun fact, Reems was slated to play Coach Carlton in “Grease” until he found out that the title wasn’t referring to what he thought it was referring to, maybe.

What’s in a name? Does it dictate behavior? Is nominative determinism legitimate or is it like phrenology, kind of clever and bunko all at the same time? Of course Mr. Reems was not christened thusly, but take someone like Anthony Wiener, who is considering a New York mayoral run. You know what, forget it. I’ve lost interest in jabbing at the wrinkled undercarriage of this joke. I did once, honestly, while driving, see an election lawn sign for some minor council seat that made me swerve from laughter at the surname. The sign said, “Elect Tom Swindle.” Really? Swindle? I think it might’ve even been for treasurer, or something, but I may just be adding that because it seemed appropriate. “Sorry Tom, it was a close race, but you lost out to the incumbent, Fred Fuck-Us-Over-And-Steal-Our-Money-And-Use-It-For-His-Gambling-Habit-Richardson.”

Being possessed spiritually by an evil demon, incubus, succubus, lamia, banshee, or “soul-squatter” is no laughing matter and no person should ever try to make light of it. Ever. There are the skeptics that chalk these things up to psychotic breakdowns, prions or virinos, but I believe it is an actual metaphysical phenomenon and luckily I have found the video proof. It is rare to get actual filmed evidence of so terrifying a spectacle, so if you decide to watch it do so at your own risk and brace yourself. I shall post it here. Be patient. At one minute eighteen seconds, all hell will break loose.

Clearly a restless spirit from the underworld decides to hop into Mr. Jones’s body and fight for control. Luckily, Tom is from Wales. Now I’m not quite sure exactly what I mean by that, I just happen to believe that the mystic forces of Celtic lands can strengthen one against the merciless jacking of one’s own body from a spirit intent on doing harm. Tom puts up a fight. The man does not submit easily. The band, to their credit, just keep playing and hope for the best. It’s a stunning struggle, a pure fight between righteous and wicked and happily, by the end Tom Jones has cast out the demon. Which means that there is at least one, (probably more), out there lurking so be on guard. They like to live in the bottom bulbous portion of Cambridge yard glasses, I’ve found, and so consider yourself warned.

But back to Mr. Cingolani. The only thing that would make Victor Cingolani’s situation a little less strange is if he married the quadruplet sisters all at once, in a daring Argentinian polygamist ceremony and then on the dance floor during the wedding reception, in the middle of the hokey pokey, he begins to flail like Tom Jones in the “Treat Her Right” video, wielding a machete he had received as a gift from his cousin, and butchers all four brides at once. And that’s what it’s all about.